Affordability and maximising the estate

Shared Agenda were asked by CHP to manage and monitor the bookable rooms with a view to increase the utilisation of bookable rooms and tackle unauthorised use of bookable rooms. NHS Hull CCG also wanted us to encourage better use of the modern LIFT estate to reduce the number of buildings across the wider, older estate that would be required going forward to enable further rationalisation.

– Issues:
Rooms booked but not used – room blocking and poor utilisation. There was and still remains a significant demand for space across the estate. Booked but unused rooms act as a blocker to other services.
Rooms not booked but used – poor cost recovery. Commissioned and non- commissioned services should pay for use of space.

The monitoring of these spaces is not something that could be practically or efficiently achieved using a manual process. Even spot checking would be time consuming, unreliable and costly in terms of resource to achieve an effective solution.

We installed our space monitoring technology into the bookable rooms. This is a live monitoring system where we are able to determine if a room is in use. This technology is discrete as not to cause distraction or disruption to building users (which manual spot checking would do). It allows us to remotely monitor if a room is or has been in use at any moment in time since the sensor was installed. This however was just the first step as we then needed to give this some context and combine it with the data from our room booking system to cross check utilisation against bookings.

Manual crosschecking of data from two different sources was again in efficient. To tackle this and integrate the two sources of data we created an analysis tool which allows analysis at the click of a button and shows underutilisation (rooms books but not used) and unauthorised use (rooms used but not booked).

Our technology, data and the analysis interface has allowed us to discuss underutilisation with service providers and to tackle unauthorised use.

Using our technologies we were able to provide an efficient and cost effective solution for managing bookable clinical and meeting room spaces across the LIFT Estate.

We were able to use the information from our technology and management systems to initiate cost recovery. During the first full year of our service (2017) the value of bookings was just over £900,000 and this was invoiced to users for the first time.

We were also able to increase utilisation of the bookable rooms by thoroughly reviewing usage and unblocking ‘block booked’ spaces that were failing to be regularly used. Through our approach we have seen an 8% increase in the use of bookable rooms since 2016.